About designing a presentation

PowerPoint gives you the flexibility to create a basic presentation or to customize your presentation further by creating your own template. All you need for a basic presentation are the standard design elements included in PowerPoint. To create a presentation template, you create your own custom slide layouts, add common elements that will appear on each slide, and then save the file as a template so that others can use it as a starting point when creating their own presentations.

To create a basic presentation, start with these design elements:

Themes Choose a theme to create a unified look for your presentation by using colorsA set of colors that is used in a file. Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme., fontsA major and minor font that is applied to a style. Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme., effectsA set of visual attributes that is applied to elements in a file. Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme., and slide backgrounds that complement each other. When you create a new presentation, the default theme is automatically applied to your presentation, but you can change the theme at any time.
Theme colors Change the theme color to a color scheme that works best for your presentation. The theme colors use coordinated colors for elements on a slide, such as text in the title placeholder or content placeholder, color fills in the tables, charts, shapes, or lines, and the slide background. Theme colors help ensure that the different elements on the slide coordinate with each other and contribute to a unified look for your presentation.
Slides and slide layouts When you add a slide, select from a variety of slide layouts available in PowerPoint. Slide layouts define the position and formatting for text and objects that appear on a slide.
Transitions and animations Apply a transition between each slide to increase the visual interest of your slide show. Or, take it a step further by animating text and objects on a slide to illustrate your point.

To create your own presentation template, customize these design elements:

Slide master Modify the slide master to add text or objectA single element of your document. An object can be a text box, an imported graphic, a shape, a picture, and so on. that you want to appear on every slide. The slide master defines the positioning and formatting for title placeholders, content placeholders, and footer elements on its associated slide layouts. Any change you make to the slide master is reflected on its associated slide layouts, which is then reflected in the slides of your presentation that use the slide layouts.
Slide layouts in slide master view Change existing slide layouts or create a custom slide layout in slide master view that fits your needs. You can then add slides with the custom layouts to your presentation.